Back-End Software Engineer

Background

OYA is changing the way soft skills are taught at companies. That is because soft skills help people work together better. Soft skills make happy teams, create a fun culture and a flexible company. OYA enables people to improve these import skills in less than 5min a day. We allow leaders to shape and change the company culture for everyone’s benefit.

Did you know?

• 58% of managers say they never receive manager training!

• Soft skills improve a team and company performance by up to 12%. That’s half a day of work a week.

• Young millennials and gen Z prefer real-time communication and collaboration tools, such as chat and google docs. These are the people who are now becoming managers.

We want to make it exciting and fun to improve these essential business skills. Skills that will stay with someone for life.

OYA’s interactive, gamified training process is delivered through a chat interface, such as Slack or Microsoft-teams. The business is young, and with that comes the rush of building something new. You will be joining a small team that is onboarding new clients and learning as we go.

The Role

OYA is a startup with an MVP*. You will use that MVP as a base and build out something that you and OYA can be proud of. This role is building the functionality that drives OYA and its mission. Every day, our users are sent a lesson that will take them 2-5 minutes to complete in a chat tool such as slack. You are responsible for ensuring that the right lesson is sent at the right time and that the lesson executes correctly. However, that is only what our users see. Our backend systems need your help.

What you will be doing day-to-day:

• Owning our tech stack.

• Writing code. Yes, code. We have a lot to build!

• Working with the CEO to understand the needs of our clients, then turning those needs into amazing features and products.

  • This means you will need to be highly independent, yet aligned with the business. Daily check-in calls and regular slack messages will be the norm.

  • The agreed scoped work will be detailed and groomed in a Kanban board.

  • Note: We will work hard to ensure you have good specifications, guidance and context. You may be our main engineer, but you are not alone at OYA.

• Coming up with cool technical solutions for real business problems.

• Hacking together 3rd party tools and plug-ins that can help us deploy new features faster. APIs are your friend.

• Some of the major upcoming engineering work:

• Context interactions within Slack, including integrating with an NLP engine.

• Expanding beyond Slack into Microsoft Teams (and beyond?)

• Enabling our courses and lessons to become even more dynamic.

• Help us obtain important security certifications so we can work with cool clients.

• Bug fixing, site & environment management, testing.

• Writing automated tests. Yes, we take testing seriously.

• Helping to grow our team, both tech and non-tech.

At OYA, we are a big fan of plug-in tools, such as Zapier. This ensures you, as the engineer, can focus on work that really needs you.

*Note: Our MVP was built by an amazing developer who was bored. They have a full-time job and are well outside our budget, so can’t help long term. They will be available for handover.

Requirements:

OYA’s system is back-end heavy with APIs and integrations. However, this role is not just about writing code. It is about solving problems.

You will need to be someone passionate about helping OYA as a business.

• 2-3 years working with Node.js, Typescript and Postgresql.

• History of dealing with 3rd party integrations.

• Experience working with people outside of tech/ engineering.

• Remote position, but you must be able to interact with the team who are in the Western EU timezone. The HQ is based in Barcelona, Spain.

• Comfortable working in English.

What we are NOT after:

• Someone who just writes code. We need someone who can take a step back and understand the problem being solved.

• Inflexibility. We are a startup. Things are going to change. User and client feedback is going to come in on a regular basis. If you can’t handle that, then OYA is not for you.

• Someone who wants to change our entire tech stack on day 1. Yes, we only have an MVP, but we love it the same way we are going to love your code.

• Wants to build everything in house, when there is a perfectly useable 3rd party tool that can easily be integrated. We are moving fast.

Benefits

We want to make OYA a fun and interesting place to work. We can offer:

• A salary of €40k-€50k per year, depending on experience.

  • Open to part-time, but not if it is alongside another existing 40hour a week, full-time job.

• The opportunity to join a growing company. You will be an early employee at a startup that is going somewhere!

• Ability to shape the company, culture and tech stack.

• Flexible hours (we have daily check-in, but it can work to your schedule).

• Full access to OYA course material. Yes, even engineers will be expected to develop their soft skills!

• Potential for equity down the road.

• If you are not in Barcelona, there will, hopefully, be opportunities to bring you to our HQ in Barcelona for workshops and team building.

Process

Email info@oyaeducation.com with your CV and a short introductory text (only 1 paragraph max please. It can be as simple as “my name is … and I would like to apply for the engineering job). Please reference this job posting. It helps us sort your CV from the spam we may get. From there:

• We will try and respond to submissions within 7 days. If you don’t hear from us within 7 days, I’m sorry, but we have decided not to continue with you.

• We will send you a short written Q&A. This will take around 45-60min to complete. We commit to responding quickly to everyone who makes it this far.

• If we like your responses, we will invite you to have a 45-60min video call with us.

• If you feel a good fit, the final call is with one of our advisors. He is an engineer too.

PLEASE NOTE: We are not open to talking to recruiters. We are happy with our existing channels. No marketing/ sales emails or outsource developer companies, please.